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Thunderbird and Spam

Eudora was my email client for years, then Netscape Communicator, before I fell into a couple of corporate jobs that forced me to use Outlook. I was looking for a way out until Outlook 2003 came along; it was very good, so I lived with various issues (like storage in the proprietary pst format) until Thunderbird came along as a well-regarded Open Source alternative. I stalled on making the transition, but Outlook became slow and crashy, and eventually cratered, evidently due to a corrupt pst file. I took the opportunity to make the move, and I've been pretty satisfied with Thunderbird since then, though it's not as robust as Outlook. Give it time.

One thing that irritates me, though, is Thunderbird's handling of spam. The junk mail controls are limited (basically an on/off switch), and though the junk mail filters are clearly catching a large percentage of the umpty hundreds of spams that fall into my mail bucket every day, there's a bunch more that the filters miss. I spend way too much time "training" by marking mails as junk, yet I seem to get the same kinds of spam over and over. I almost never see false positives, which is good, but I'm not clear why the filtering is not more successful, and I can't find much by way of documentation, just as there's no real tweaking of the junk mail controls. I've looked for additional spam-blocking products, but what I find are products created specifically to work with Outlook.

I shouldn't complain, since so much of my spam is filtered successfully, but since junk mail handling is supposed to be a key feature of Thunderbird, I'd love for it to be more useful.

jon posted this at 8:45 AM
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